Outdoors: Both man and nature must share blame for demise of shellfish

Where have all our big sets of shellfish gone? Thirty years ago, we used to drag the bottom off Barnstable’s Kalmus Beach for abundant scallops. After major storms, we could expect to pick a good number of them washed up on the beach.

We always looked forward to eating some of the freshest ones raw. They’re as delicious as oysters, only sweeter. Those days are gone. Local scallops close to shore have been declining for decades.

Several factors are implicated in their demise. Over-fishing, pollution, habitat degradation, diseases and bad weather can all affect the highly vulnerable 2-year scallop life cycle. My brother Gary, who has shell-fished the Cape all his life, connects their disappearance with the loss of our eel-grass beds.

Our local mussels have locally declined as well. Shellfish authority Tom Marcotti recalls their last big set, which provided incredible, epic shell fishing in Barnstable from 2001 to 2006. Mussels can live five or six years, and the Barnstable mussels during that period grew as big as pears. There were literally billions of them on 60 stacked-solid acres of Mussel Point, beneficially filtering the harbor. Commercial harvesters easily filled their limit of 50 bags a day, six days each week. At $6 a bag, they brought home many $1,800 weekly paychecks and didn’t put even a dent into the mussel population. Then came the sudden, stunning crash.

Since 2006, we’ve not had a good mussel crop. Some say that’s nature. Recent research, though, implicates a little-known disease called neoplasia — a kind of shellfish leukemia.

Many recreational shell fishermen are now concerned about the soft-shell clam (steamer) population in Barnstable. Those who came down Memorial Day Weekend to dig them were very disappointed to find few clams in the Scudder Lane recreational area mudflats. Some diggers remembering past, bountiful seasons were infuriated, looking for a culprit to blame. A few confided they’re not going back to the clam-flats this season.

Today’s harvest is a shadow of what we regularly dug from 1990 to 1995, the period of the last great sets of soft-shelled clams in Barnstable. Then, one could dig one or two holes and quickly fill a basket. Commercial diggers in 1995 actually took about 12,000 bushels off the Barnstable flats — a far cry from the pittance taken by them now. Did they harvest too many as some resentful recreational diggers allege — or did disease and bad weather once again conspire against the clams? Something nefarious is certainly going on.

Special areas set aside for commercial diggers with special permits are still producing fair numbers of clams. Is that because commercial areas are inherently better and subject to wise, perennial harvesting practices? Do recreational interests have reason to gripe that they’ve been given leftover, inferior clamming areas? Are commercial diggers going into recreational areas and over-harvesting clams there? Are Native Americans, with their special harvesting privileges, contributing to the problem? These are all questions I hear with increasing volume. But again, neoplasia is implicated in the soft-shell clam crash, though apparently less so in the areas reserved for Barnstable’s commercial shell-fishing.

Many recreational shell fishermen have consequently put their names on the list to receive highly sought rights to an acre of the special commercial areas off Scudder Lane and West Bay. That list is so long, though, that some applicants will die well before they’re selected for a spot.

Today, there remain few options for filling a basket with clams. Some little-known areas, like the Marstons Mills River, require a boat. Little honey holes like that are well-kept secrets. Some potential epicenters for shellfish, like the Centerville River, are too polluted to harvest. They’re plagued by human waste because town fathers never led the way to install sewers for homes along its banks. The only certainty is that the price of steamers this year will increase as their supply diminishes.

As for our beloved oysters, they’re periodically susceptible to infections from Dermo and MSX, two lethal protozoan parasites. Our quahogs have also at various times been victimized by QPX, an acronym for “quahog parasite unknown.”

The only local shellfish that don’t seem badly affected are razor clams, which may be more immune to crashes because their sets are usually widely dispersed and rarely enormous. Maybe once a decade we’ll get a huge set of them in Massachusetts.

Shellfish may be more susceptible to diseases today because of greater stress put upon them. We may have little control over the looming forces of nature like bad weather and higher temperatures, but overharvesting, polluting, and degrading habitat are destructive, costly acts that we must take responsibility for — and work more effectively to prevent.

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